Saturday, October 8, 2011

SECOND TRY WITH GLUTEN-FREE PIE

Vegan Pecan Pie-- gluten-free!

We're having our first of two Thanksgiving dinners (it's Canadian Thanksgiving weekend) tonight at my son's. (And, boy, is it windy out there-- I hope the power stays on!) They requested pecan pie, and told them I'd make the crust GF because my DIL Amber is gluten-sensitive. Smarting from my GF pie fail yesterday, I decided to try a recipe recommended by my friend Julie Hasson, the pie crust recipe in "Cooking with Isaiah" by Silvana Nardone.

I think it was success, but I haven't used that much fat in a pie crust for a long time! I found out afterwards that I should wear my new reading glasses when I read recipes, because I used 1 1/2 cups non-hydrogenated shortening |(another thing I seldom use, and never in pie crust anymore) instead of 1 1/3 cups--yikes!! It seemed to work, though-- even if it is super-rich. I also must admit that it was trickier to roll out than ordinary pie dough. And, it makes enough for about 2 1/2 pies, actually. Here's the dough before it's 15-minute rest in the freezer:

Here's the dough in the pie dishes (there was enough leftover for a small free form tart):

I had some trouble getting the first one in the pie dish, so, with the second crust, I rolled it out on a piece of baking parchment, put my left hand under the parchment, lifted it up a bit, placed the upside-down dish on the crust and gently flipped the whole thing over so that the crust was in the dish. I carefully peeled the parchment off the dough and gently fit it into place and fluted the edges, saving the scraps for my little tart. As you can see, I patched it in a few places, which was easy to do.

I pre-baked the crust for 10 minutes (after pricking all over with a fork, as usual) at 400 degrees F. With a wheat crust, you would only bake for 3 minutes, but this definitely seemed to need more.

Pre-baked crust:

Then I filled the crusts with my filling (from my new book "World Vegan Feast")and baked them at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes. They came out looking perfect!

I looked around on the net for low-fat gluten-free pie crust, but I guess it's not possible (please tell me if I'm wrong!). However, I did find one recipe that sounds pretty reasonable and uses either some millet flour or sorghum flour, which is more nutritious than white rice flour. The original recipe is here and it uses sorghum flour and tapioca flour, but this blogger used millet flour instead of sorghum flour successfully, which is what I will do next time I make a GF crust, because I have a hard time finding sorghum flour here-- and I can grind my own millet flour.

Here's the little apple tart I made with the leftover dough, using the leftover apples from my fail on Thursday:

In case it's useful: I've had good success with rolling out finicky gluten-free dough by putting it inside an unzipped gallon-sized ziplock bag. This works much better than even parchment paper. Once the dough is rolled, put a hand in to remove the top layer of plastic from the dough. Then flip the bag and dough over and remove the plastic from the other side of the dough. Then you can use scissors to cut open the sides of the bag and lift off the top layer of plastic to flip the dough into a pie plate.

Yum!

I still am totally geeked that you're making gluten-free food. Thank you for doing this!!!

Hi, if you have a Indian/ Pakistani/ Asian store nearby, you might be able to find sorghum flour there, labelled jowar flour. I buy many gluten-free flours at the local Indian store; they are much cheaper than from other specialty or health food stores.

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